Transport pillow

Ah, pillows. A while ago I proclaimed that every quilt should receive a coordinating pillow, but this time I went straight to pillow to test a design inspired by a Swedish train's upholstery (moquette to those in the know), glimpsed in a controversial post here. They were on about the embroidered graffiti, but I was more interested in the pattern underneath. You can add rail upholstery to my list of geeky interests—there was a time when I could identify London Underground lines based on a glimpse of moquette . When I was back in London last summer, one of the saddest things was discovering that some of the Tube trains had been reupholstered, sending my recognition skills the way of Strand Station (ruck, ruck, ruck; pretend you found my obscure Underground humour amusing).

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I made a quilt design based on the train in EQ6 and scaled it down to pillow size for a test run. Of course, I probably should have practiced half-square triangles before jumping into the strips of equilateral triangles—stretchy, stretchy, stretchy. And somehow my carefully planned dimensions still needed some yanking and pinning under duress when it came to sewing the rows together. So the pattern still needs some perfecting.

All along I had planned to outline quilt the arrows by hand to reinforce their shape, but at the last minute I decided to just stitch in the ditch. The original plan probably would have looked better and been easier to quilt. But as a design test, I think the project worked out nicely. The simple pattern and colour scheme make it both easy and modern, so I'll probably try a larger version with bigger blocks someday.

Since I was just testing things out, I wanted to keep the pillow cheap. The only thing bought new was the pillow form (and that half off). The red fabric was left from Plain Spoken, the pink fabric and thread from my flamingo quilt, the batting from Card Catalog, and the backing from some makeshift curtains I had in my skanky London bedsit. If I showed you pictures of the place, you'd know why I was more interested in the Tube trains.